From the Osteolix to the Inner Clumps

Underworld Lore #4 is coming this week, which means the Arcane Dwellings table needed to be done faster than expected, so I did the last nine myself, to be sure there are 30 ready to go.

If you want to add any, like Red Orc did with the Threshold of Eternity on Monday, go right ahead, and Greg can push that many of mine off the list.

The lit darkness - John Blanche and primeval parents

Two rather stunning thoughts struck me yesterday. I'm almost certainly not the first to think either of them, but given they're both related to gaming, and to each other in some way too, I thought I'd discuss them here. They concern living links to the past and future.

Conan, Frankenstein's monster, trenches and Chaos

Looking through blogs here and there today, and at subjects being discussed - Conan, Frankenstein, trenches, Chaos - I get to wondering: am I a barbarian, built of reclaimed bits of popular culture, hiding away from an outer inner darkness I won't face? Are you?

Here's some recommended reading: read the future. Start by reading between the lines and it's not so hard to do. There's a lot going on in between those lines. Read the future and if it's not escapism you're getting, it might be worth deciding - can the you of today live in that world? Because if we don't put in some work between those lines, ourselves, we might just end up so well adapted to that future we won't even know what happened.

Might just get a sense of something not quite li-  But still, play the games we played as kids, read and watch the same things, as if nothing happened. Nothing happened. As if.

Just breaking one or two fifth walls - or maybe a sixth?

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New genres A-Z - from archeopunk to zombie derival

Here then are all of the entries for the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2012, 26 posts with the theme of possible new genres for fiction, maybe in gaming but also beyond it. Some are deadly serious, others may just be silly, but as so often, it depends on you - the person.

The underpinning was this debate, on themes that have been running through a lot of the posting at the Expanse, and the discussion has spun out across the months. The latest instalment could be this recent back-and-forth. Feel free to join in, anywhere and -when.

Deep thought Friday

With a recent reminder of the Apollo programme and the clear contrast with Curiosity, it's natural there's been a lot of talk about how things stand.

So when we say a given entity was ahead of its time, could we in fact be a) recognising that we ourselves are behind our own time, b) admitting that we've allowed ourselves to become trapped in a future the given entity helped create, and/or c) accepting the entity as a creator and in doing so exonerating ourselves of failure to do better?

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Read any good sly-fi?

More inspiration for gaming and wider fiction, like the space plasma and symbiogenesis posts, but more like those on geoengineering and warming, and maybe even comment forms teaching an AI.

This time it's about helium, a gas with a range of applications, some arguably critical.

But there's not much on Earth, and even less because the market price has collapsed thanks to a timed sell-off of stores. The good news is the moon seems to have a lot...

The fiction? What if a sell-off was designed to cause a shortage and create an economic incentive, in this case for private spaceflight? Providing transport to the moon for helium extraction could be highly lucrative, and a decade or so is good lead-time; a consulting role in exchange for support might seem a smart career move. For bonus plot strands, some of those involved might want to cut funds to projects for ideology or appropriation.

More? From the blogs, how about this suggestion of western self-deception re Chinese military development, or this challenge to a buttress of modern physics, Mr Einstein's special relativity, or this look at the failings of reason itself in contemporary culture?

I need a label for these posts, so I'll propose a possible new genre. Here's a definition:

sly-fi (n., pl. -s)  a fictional genre consisting in the interpolation of feasible secret histories from reported facts and their elaboration in other settings

That's the label I'll use from now on, so you can find all the posts, including this, here.

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Deep thought Friday

Another DtF via Mr Clarke, with a warm-up here.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.         Arthur C. Clarke

Is "advanced" the right term? If we perceive time as linear, are we mistaking the nature of change, seeing it as progress? Seeing what was or could have been as failed? Is our thinking on science a teleology, or teleological argument, with science the deity? Would 'sufficiently unfamiliar' be more accurate? Could elsewhen than our future hold unfamiliar technology and our age be 'backward'?

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The withering

A moment of potential horror. It's inspired more than anything by Trey's unsettling post on an imprisoned General Brant and Sir Timothy of Kent's rules for character ageing.

It also ties in with the mention of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim here and the speed of light here, the arrival of autumn, and some of the events reported over the past few days.

I lock myself away, cut every cable, but it bleeds under doors, leeches through walls. Creeps up, washes over me, cracks my face. It's time.

It's for Flash Fearsday of course, a piece of flash fiction in 140 characters, open to all.

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Review - Minority Report

What an interesting film this is. I deliberately catch up with big movies and books years after release so it was the first time I'd seen it. I think a delay helps balance the gadgets and gimmicks better with the more subtle themes, and this seems like a film to benefit.

On the whole I enjoyed it. In terms of inspiration it's got lots to take away. The concept and accumulation of detail are impressive, exactly as we'd expect, although for me it's not as profound as it seems to want us to think it is and there's plenty that doesn't work, is too loose, oddly tired or silly, and all the obvious laughs felt somehow out of place.

It does still manage to surprise though, on many levels, and there's a feeling of a natural development despite the railroading, with plenty of observations to make and layers to peel back. I'm still thinking about the construction, the relationships of the characters, the painful ambiguity, especially of the ending, and the very human, honest approach.

Appropriately, given the water theme, it's the immersion in the world that really grabbed me, though more the subjective world or worlds of the central figures than what I saw as a rather uneven near future setting. It also has one of the best shots I can remember in a blockbuster, downstairs at the hotel, 10 to 15 perfectly realised seconds of cinema.

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Deep thought not Friday

Here we are as planned, but still not on a Friday. For a warm up, I suggest this, this, this and this.

Saying that the laws of physics as we know them permit travel into the past is the same as saying that, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, they permit a teapot to be in orbit around Venus

Brian Cox, Cern researcher

Can we doubt if this quote spreads and we do reach Venus, there won't one day be a teapot in orbit there, even if only as a prank? Could time travel, or any speculated tech, be as inevitable?

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